Search Results

“... London demi-monde before the Second World War, but for their literary depiction he has to go to Jean Rhys. Rhys said in her 1979 autobiography, Smile Please, that she ‘used to long so fiercely to be black’. This and her nostalgia for her Caribbean birthplace are enough for Sandhu: ‘Her racial background and her ...”

“... he might have discovered a complete literary self and exploited its full powers. A Céline or a Jean Rhys might have been fulfilled by this sort of setback, but it is somehow characteristic of Hamilton that crisis blurred his creativity. That may be why in his later books the abjections of habit blur the outlines of the people he writes about, so that ...”

“... within her chosen genre. Davey’s work is also allied to the tradition of novelists like Jean Rhys, Barbara Pym or Anita Brookner, who quietly insist on the persistence of alienation, domestic or otherwise, in women’s lives. Breakdowns in communication between the sexes punctuate her dialogue. ‘She could see him thinking she was an odd girl ...”

“... When​ Jean Stafford published Boston Adventure in 1944, at the age of 29, Life magazine called her ‘the most brilliant of new fiction writers’. The novel sold an impressive 380,000 copies and she went on to publish two more, The Mountain Lion (1947) and The Catherine Wheel (1952). Throughout the 1950s, her short stories were a fixture in the New Yorker ...”

“... referred to simply by her surname, tout court. Woolf hasn’t made it, even after all these years; Rhys without the Jean is incognito; Nin without the Anais looks like a typo. Colette, Madame Colette, remains, in this as much else, unique.Colette did not acquire this distinction because she terrorised respect language out of ...”

“... Coleman knew everyone who was anyone, and read voraciously, there’s no mention in her diaries of Jean Rhys. Their paths ought to have crossed in literary Paris, and in some sense The Shutter of Snow is aimed at Rhys’s paranoid terrain: the broken dependent women, their alienated, subtly intuitive femininity, their ...”

“... we have Ivy Compton Burnett, for example, ‘with her attacks upon male institutions’; and Jean Rhys displaying a lacerating insight into the bad behaviour of men towards women. In the end, however, Rosalind Miles comes down on the side of the separatists, referring with approval to the concept of ‘a female culture acting as an intellectual ...”

“... anguish beyond what is said. The Haunted House is a very talented first novel, as vertiginous as Jean Rhys, drawing us into the imagery of the heroine’s private nightmares. It is a poetic evocation of smashed lives, rubble, debris, unopened parachutes and emptied and discarded duty-free bottles. Grace Nichols’s Whole of a Morning Sky is a very much ...”

“... his reading as soon as he starts to write. His fiction has the same freakish certitude as that of Jean Rhys, Flannery O’Connor and Christina Stead. Pritchett’s curious inwardness when writing about women has often been noticed: ‘No,’ he said and told her what he had told her a dozen times before. She liked her flat to have someone else’s voice ...”

“... yet, but turned out to belong to other adventurers and colonials, to Christina Stead, or Jean Rhys. This passage, for instance, is surely a first draft for Good Morning, Midnight: Thank God! the steps have gone past my door. In the mirror she saw again that strange watchful creature who had been her companion on the journey, that woman with ...”

“... in the works of such writers as Richardson, Rebecca West, Alexandra Kollontai, Christina Stead, Jean Rhys, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Miller’s deliberately unsystematic readings have an impressive cumulative power. By the end of the book, as she discusses the work of black and working-class writers, women who have been so excluded ...”

“... turn up with small, delightful gifts to hearten the cheerless. She took on the even more difficult Jean Rhys in her old age and put up with no end of fuss and fume from her, recognising perhaps another talented beauty grown old and enraged. Plante found her refusal to talk about his deeper self painful. ‘I wonder,’ he asks her at lunch when she is ...”

“... drown themselves in chains. Bohemians of a dedicated ferocity that make the behaviour of Jean Rhys and her companions, so deplored by John Bayley recently in these pages, look like the Teddy Bears’ Picnic. Oh! That Imar O’Hagan, with his trained snails and his ‘fridge full of blocks of frozen vampire bats “like an airline breakfast of ...”

“... worker manipulating the robot on the shop floor, every salesman in his dark suit, every jean-clad punk on his motorcycle, and every dedicated Marxist, has read some chapters of The Tale of Genji (and of the Pillow Book of the same period). Many of the residents of one of the noisiest capital cities in the world, living under an often hazy, polluted ...”

“... best book to date is Difficult Women, an unflattering account of his friendship with Sonia Orwell, Jean Rhys and Germaine Greer. He won’t be winning first prize for dignity, but he tells it pretty much like it was – and like he was, you imagine. But discretion is never his first instinct. As for Stephen himself, I sometimes wonder if he wants me to ...”